CHRONICLE

… and greater successes

1991: 25 years of Hof. Hof no longer was a football town. The FC Bayern Hof, which in 1967 just barely missed getting into the national league, once again failed to make it to the highest amateur class. So the traditional film festival football match can certainly be considered the most important one of the year – one in which the FC Hof Film Festival deemed to make up for the 0:5 loss the year before. But it didn’t work out: KARNIGGELS-director Detlev Buck guarding the goal was unable to prevent a 2:3 defeat.

The festival, however, was a success. Badewitz:

‘The whole world wanted to come to Hof. The program was better than ever before.’

The best did not come from Germany, though, but rather from Canada (Atom Egoyan’s THE ADJUSTER), from the USA (BOYZ ‘N THE HOOD), from England (RIFF-RAFF by Ken Loach), from France (DELICATESSEN) and from Belgium (TOTO L’HERO).

In 1992, the film festival football team won a 4:2 victory and respect was gained for the German film with Ralf Huettner’s DER PAPAGEI (‘The parrot’), in which Harald Juhnke played an eloquent Micawber roped into services for a right wing party, with Niklaus Schilling’s DEUTSCHFIEBER (‘German fever’), Helke Misselwitz’s HERZSPRUNG (‘Crack in the heart’) which showed how the reunited Germans dealt with a foreigner, and with VERLORENE LANDSCHAFT (LOST LANDSCAPE), Andreas Kleinert’s description of a model – and hence very difficult – (East-)German childhood. So much for German films not participating in what life’s all about.